The development of scientific writing : linguistic features and historical context

 Content: Introduction --
 Diachronic study of scientific text --
 Systemic Functional Linguistics --
 a suitable framework --
 Thematic structure --
 Grammatical metaphor --
 Part 1: From Chaucer to Newton --
 1. Beginning with Chaucer --
 Where it all began --
 The Passive --
 Personal pronouns --
 Nominalization --
 2. Between Chaucer and Newton --
 A troubled period --
 Francis Bacon --
 Robert Boyle --
 Henry Power and Robert Hooke --
 Experimental and descriptive sciences --
 3. The Royal Society and Newton --
 The place of the Royal Society and its Philosophical Transactions --
 Newton --
 Newton and the influence of Latin --
 Newton and Huygens --
 Part 2: The intervening centuries --
 4. A way forward --
 Two centuries of increasing nominalization --
 The corpus --
 5 Passives --
 Increasing use of passives --
 Passives and process types --
 6 First person pronoun Subjects --
 A rare phenomenon --
 The eighteenth century situation --
 Continuation in the nineteenth century --
 The twentieth century: a radical change --
 7. Nominalization --
 Nominalizing processes --
 Experiment --
 Nominalized processes as Modifiers --
 8. Thematic Structure --
 Motivation for the passive --
 The Grammatical Functions of Topical Themes --
 Textual Themes --
 Interpersonal Themes --
 Thematic progression --
 9. The semantic nature of Themes --
 A typology of Themes --
 Minor types of Theme --
 Features of the experiment --
 The human element --
 Textual reference --
 Mathematics --
 10. An Interpersonal coda --
 Ancients and Moderns --
 Epistolary framing --
 Praise --
 Criticism --
 Community --
 Provenance --
 Referencing --
 Appendix 1 --
 Appendix 2.